


Happy Days Are Here Again

by ShamHarga



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:11:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3186779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShamHarga/pseuds/ShamHarga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corypheus has been defeated and Thedas celebrates. But his fall isn't the end for Thedas' heroes. A series of shorts about what comes after, in the hollow breath after victory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The King

**Author's Note:**

> Written to the Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand duet Get Happy/Happy Days are Here Again, which I've always found more sad than it seems.

The ball is everything Alistair expects. All shiny, scary and a particular brand of smelly. Despite the neutral ground it’s distinctly and uncomfortably Orlesian. It’s a celebration so the masks have smiles carved into them. It doesn’t make him feel any more comfortable.

He is dancing with Celene. There will be grumbles, whispers, and just enough gossip to provide excitement but nothing that will end the world. The euphoria of seeing another day has made people very forgiving, so it is time for Orlais and Ferelden to dance together. So to speak.

He is spending every beat praying that Ferelden doesn’t stand on Orlais’ toes. Celene isn’t aware of the immediate danger. The white sneer of her mask is angled to his, but behind it her eyes are darting across the crowd. She scares him, this woman who can devote most of her brain to judging, weighing, calculating while he’s still trying to remember which of his feet is the left one.

He sees her eyes catch; and her hand grips his a little tighter. Interesting. The empress rarely stumbles. Alistair thinks it’s time to spice things up a bit. He executes a twirl that both gives him a view of her eyeline and stays within the beat. Mostly.

Celene bristles. He might have yanked her arm.

He hasn't seen anything, just the chittering crowd in gossipy tangles or leaning against the walls of the garden. Another step and swish gives him second scan. Just soulless masks, glinting. But then! Framed in an archway, a shadow darker than the knotted trees behind. It's a lone figure, hooded, slim ears striking the lamplight.

It couldn’t be.

It's the right height. Definitely female. Shrinking from the heat of the crowd.

 _It couldn’t be_.

But the past months have brought so many impossible things. How could the Maker create a world where only horrors could step out of the claws of death?

Step and twirl. He’s getting this now. His heart sinks. The shadow is gone. Where? Step and twirl. No crushed toes. And nothing but masked faces and barely concealed pomposity. And muttering. Always the muttering. 

Celene squeezes his hand cruelly. She is furious: he can tell because one of the creases around her mouth is a fraction deeper. There is clearly some dilemma on the dancefloor; half the couples are sticking to the steps, but more deferential pairs are mimicking the twirling royal couple with mixed success. There will be lots of bruised feet tonight. He guiltily slips back into the proscribed steps – one, two, three, look elegantly bored, one, two, three – until the music ebbs.

The couples finish and there is scandalised applause. How do Orlesians manage to get such inflection into the slap of a hand?

He cannot bow to his partner, nor she to him, so he nods his head. She does the same, more quickly, and with an incline that makes him feel like a boy caught with a crumbed face in the pantry.

‘You have developed an ambitious repertoire, Your Majesty.’ She says.

‘Oh, you know…. End of the world. Or not.’ He says. ‘Puts the spin in your remigold.’

‘How colourful.’ Her mouth – lined but still beautiful – quirks slightly. ‘And true. But then the remigold is a simple dance.’ The words shimmer like the silk of her skirts over a heap of hidden layers and folds that he knows he’ll never uncover, never mind understand. Celene bustles off to the next great uncle and he escapes the dancefloor.

It takes three fobbed off nobles and a minor diplomatic incident involving a meat fork before he can sneak away into the dark passages circling the garden. It is quiet despite the strains of the party. The flags are cold, empty. Any inhabitants are long gone. He has no reason to expect different, even if…

If it had been –

He feels he would have known. There would be a – a  _pressure_  – in the world. Some counter feeling to this hollow sickness he is forced to carry.

Beneath a weeping bough Ferelden holds its head in its hands and wishes it had only ever been Alistair. 

As the night ends he is encouragedinto another dance with Celene. Chords strike to launch the last movement and painted men open vast canopies over the courtyard, spilling thousands of rose petals around the dancers. Couples laugh as petals enhance hair arrangements, are dislodged prettily from shoulders, and amass at jewelled feet that swish through the red velvelty carpet. In the sea of petals he spots one full bloom, miraculously intact. It is paler than the others, the petals small and precise. He has to pick it up.

Their path is set but he nudges it a little through the cavorting couples. Majesties can carve their own path. As the song ends, he parts from Celene and bobs his head a bit too vigorously. Eamon will give him a talking to for that.

He is too late, anyway.

He scoops up his crushed rose and lets the broken petals bleed onto his hand.

 


	2. The Champion

 

It's been hours of stomping across the soggy landscape. The sky is purpling like a bruise as the last rainclouds drain over the horizon.

Hawke is sure his feet will never feel dry again.

He can finally see his destination and it hardly seems worth the blisters and rotted toenails. Just a muck coloured shack squatting in the crease of two fields. It's been further than his informant promised, but now it's all too close.

He sets flies buzzing damply as he corners the low slung building. Good. Flies mean no spiders. He ignores the main door – a cold, dark window tells him that no-one’s home even if he felt like introducing himself.

_Good evening, I'm the former Champion of Kirkwall. Did you know you have a dead rat in the begonias?_

_A feature is it? I can see it making waves in Antiva._

He slinks along crumbling walls down the side of the shack, through knotted brambles and greying foliage. Someone’s stomped a path before him, but not often; the thorns snag his cloak. At least it’s not his favourite. It’s at least five threadbare tragedies since his favourite.

He pauses at a hatch half buried in the weeds. This is it. Funny how the excitement can drain from moment. Like point after a fight when the adrenaline flees and you’re just picking up teeth.

 _Ha ha._ Hawke thinks, without much conviction.

He steels himself and pulls the rusted handle. Foul air wafts from the dark gullet of a cellar. He heaves himself into the cold and eases the hatch closed behind him.

With nowhere to escape the musty stench is downright aggressive. It’s the smell of books and men after damp has gnawed at them.

He’s in a small, low-ceilinged room. His head would hit the ceiling if he was as tall as he pretends he is. There’s a single candle pissing light over the floor, or at least what he assumes is a floor once you get beneath the paper that is dumped from corner to corner and gathering in curling drifts against the lonely table. Their pallid faces hold maps, recipes, and long paragraphs of who knows what. Some must be from other people; not every page looks like the aftermath of brutal quill murder.  

What with wardens and monsters and … actually, fewer blood mages than he’d expected, all things considered… but then after _other_ wardens and nightmares he’s been gone longer than he thought. He’s missed three safe houses. Were they all like this?

‘Anders?’ he calls, feeling only a little stupid. There’s barely room to stand, never mind hide. There’s a slim nook that must lead to the rest of the house but the steep steps beyond remain cold and dark.

‘Anders?’ He says again, for lack of anything better to do. There’s nowhere to sit. The bed is presumably the slightly squishier looking pile of rubbish. The table bears a single neglected plate and a glass of wine with a film so thick it might as easily be mould as dust. This isn’t the place a human would live.

Hawke stands frozen. The lead grip of dread seizes his ribcage. This is it. He’s said his final goodbye to Anders, and he hadn’t even known it.

He’s known this day would come, that it was lurking, _waiting_ … but it’s not… he’s not…

For the first time in ages he knows he’s not ready.

Then there are footsteps. A different coloured gloom spills from the stairwell. There is a deep, scratchy roar and the cellar bursts blue.

Hawke slams his eyes shut. ‘It’s me.’ He says steadily, though his hand itches for his staff. He counts the seconds until the purple shadows disappear from his eyelids.

It is Anders who sends papers skittering. Who grabs his neck, his hair, who kisses him ‘til he can hardly breathe.

Gasping and desperate, Hawke is grateful. Why is he not relieved?

By the time he hears Anders’ questions – _how are you? What happened? Maker, you look awful_ – he can’t remember the words to explain how he was too late to stop another monster.

Anders grips him in the wreckage of scribbled hopes and half-finished thoughts. He tastes like the Fade; hair raising, electric. The smell of power and mystery, and of clawed Templar chestplates and blood spilling in the street. Sick green and spiders and fangs and nightmares. Anders’ fingers probe at his ribs, anchoring him close to ease the shuddering.

‘I could have lost you.’ His healer’s voice says, while his murderer’s hand snakes up to Hawke’s neck.

Hawke doesn’t feel particularly found.


	3. The Inquisitor

The letter is heavy in her hand. The thick Warden seal is unbroken. He will have had his Joining by now. Blackwall - Thom Rainier, the correction always chases like a shadow, like the chill sorrow after the bliss of lovemaking - Thom Rainier will be a Grey Warden by now. Or he will not, in the most final way imaginable. She knows little about the Wardens' initiation ritual but it is enough to know that few survive. The script above the grim seal is not in his hand.

A raven screeches in her ear. The birds still don't trust her presence this high in the spytower, fidgeting and jittering as she hovers in the abandoned skyloft. Her green halo must be unnerving. Birds lack the intellect to recognise a true and holy boon of the Maker. Andraste looms at her shoulder. Stone arms reach out, drawing in the world, welcoming the faithful. She can feel those cold limbs tightening like a noose. Is Andraste pleased with the new Divine? The Maker's bride wields a sword, after all.

The shadow of Andraste chases her to the stairs. As she circles down the tower the air is dead where people should have been. Leliana: the Divine she should have prevented. Dorian: busy building his own life away from her; settling _for_ instead of settling _with._ When she passes through the mercenary bunkroom Solas' mural stares down at her. It will always be unfinished.

The letter in her hand is itself unfinished. With the virgin seal untouched it holds a punishment forking away into the future; one path for the Grey Warden Blackwall triumphant, another ending in the righteous death of the butcher Thom Rainier.

She could toss it in the fire with the others. The ones recommending changes in the Inquisition. The diplomatic calls for more suitable figureheads. The politest words assembled to say that while the Inquisitor had been an acceptable shield against the horrors at end the world, the civilised business of peacetime should be left to her betters.

She sweeps through the grand hall. There is no excitement heating the air these days, just a stale and practiced deference. Maids and soldiers curtsey and scuttle away, like beetles from the light. Do any of the traitorous letters come from within her own halls?

Her fingers toy with her weapon – the one civilised society would be afraid to see her carry. Up the heavy steps to her room she feels the prisons beneath her feet. The weight of them suck at her boots like so much mud. She feels the desperate grasp of the traitors. The bite of the venomous snakes. And the failures – the soldiers in her livery who committed war crimes and the smugglers who betrayed the Inquisiton's rates for more favourable ones.

There are punishments for those who take that sort of judgment into their own hand. On the bleakest nights she wonders how many soldiers it takes to distinguish a vigilante from an Inquisitior.

Her room is cold. It's always cold. She tosses the folded letter onto her desk, warden seal still unbroken. This time she wants to keep the blade of execution hovering as long as she can.

She opens a balcony door and lets the icy wind scythe her arms. The chill pain is a whetstone, honing her focus. Friends, allies, even holy authority; all could be stripped away yet the Inquisition remains. How much of it can be lost to swarf before it's no longer recognisable as the weapon it was?

But it is wrong to think of the Inquisition as a weapon. It is a frothing beast, barrelling forward. And it needs to eat, or it will consume itself.

She looks at the starless frame of sky where Corypheus launched his final stand. She knows is peverse to miss him, but still there is an ache where he once stood. No-one would understand. But without a nemesis to chase, there is only prey.

The sky is silent. Her palm itches. The Fade always takes as much as it gives. What does sealing each new breach take from her? The air in Skyhold only gets heavier. It chokes with decisions made and unmade. The ghost of Varric's satires - her ghost - stalks the halls. Even when its author languishes in the dissident's jail, the Dread Herald seeps into the world, sketched in cheap charcoal and hearsay, her ravenous jaw unhinges and gobbles any fresh mercy.

The Inquisitor yearns to leap into the mountains. She longs to escape a question that isn't hers, to use her burning green burden to tear a refuge in the world - in time if she must - and hide.

But the Inquisition needs its Inquisitor.

The stars stare back, impassive. She imagines a gentle cough behind her, sawdust-stained fingers brushing the cares from her hair. Soft words that share the burden and remind her that to doubt is human, and to strive is strength. But there is no presence in the shadows. There is no sturdy anchor with rough cheeks of a warden and voice of a lyre. He lies in a letter; in crumpled carcass that lies scuttled on her desk. The paper snags her fingers as she pulls away, but she does pull away. This burden she will carry later.

For now, the Inquisition needs its Inquisitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to any Blackwall fans, but I've always felt that pairing was ripe for some misery.


End file.
